Chris Hillman - Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond

Chris Hillman has been a well-kept secret in the history of rock. Yeah, we all know how great he was in The Byrds, but his contributions go well beyond that. Chris was a true innovatorthe man who invented country rock. Sorry, Gram, Chris got there first! Every time The Eagles board their private jet, Chris at least paid for the fuel.

Tom Petty

Before I met Chris Hillman, I imagined him to be a larger-than-life musical adventurer who had been to the moon and back, lived to tell about it, and was the keeper of a thousand songs and stories. After I got to know Chris Hillman, I learned that he is, indeed, a larger-than-life charactera fearless musical adventurer who has been to the moon and back more than once, and brought back a lifetimes worth of colorful stories to tell, many of which are within the pages of this book.

I also came to understand that Chris Hillman is a bona fide pioneering godfather to generations of musical souls whove sought inspiration at that divine crossroads where rock & roll, country, bluegrass, folk, honky tonk, and gospel music intersect and harmonize. Chris sings like a Byrd, his is the soul of a poet, hes the only guy in the world that can properly play Eight Miles High on the mandolin, and his bass playing is the essence of great American rock & roll. Chris Hillman is a national treasure, truly a statesman. Hes my brother, and I dearly love him.

Marty Stuart

This book brought back a lot of great memories! Chris covers the humorous origins of The Byrds and subsequent adventures, from meeting our heroes the Beatles in 1965 to going on tour together with Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives in 2018.

Roger McGuinn

Reading this book reminds me how much fun it was to be in the Byrds. We didnt really have a clue about the music biz, but we did love the music and we had such a blast when we were actually doing it. Wish I had known more and done better, but we did create some wonderful art together, and I will always be proud to have been a part of it and to be friends with Chris.

David Crosby

I always loved Chris Hillmans bass playing in The Byrdsreally muscular, yet surprisingly nuanced. Never given to flash or anything showy, he concentrated on keeping a death grip on the groove. So, when he would come around the Whisky a Go Go to catch a set or two of our band, The Buffalo Springfield, I was always thrilled. Wed lurk about at the back of the Whisky a Go Go, cracking each other up with flinty-eyed observations regarding the predatory titans of the music business. Chris taught me that it was all about the songs, and we agreed that the best thing to do was to write them yourself and publish them yourself. Own the copyright.

We had a great time putting the Manassas band together in England and creating that telepathic bond that develops playing live onstage or writing songsopen enough to let the other get inside your head and embrace the magic. It was all made possible by the fact that we started out as friends. We had an epic musical partnership for a while, and that Manassas band made some incredible music.

Stephen Stills

Chris Hillman emerged from the ashes of The Byrds a seasoned and prolific songwriter. His compositions infusing folk, country, and rock have always been lyrically substantial and melodically memorable. That standard of excellence has never wavered, making him the unvarnished gem of every band he has inhabited. Its time to applaud his legacy and salute the hands that rocked the cradle.

Bernie Taupin

Time Between

My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond

Copyright 2020 by Chris Hillman, Bar None Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of brief passages embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Chris Hillman has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work.

Book production by Adept Content Solutions.

Cover design by Patrick Crowley

Cover photo courtesy of Sony Music Archives

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Hardback ISBN: 9781947026353

Ebook ISBN: 9781947026384

Published by BMG

www.bmg.com

www.chrishillman.com

For Connie, Ill love you until time passes me by.

For Catherine, Nick, and my grandchildren, and for Nicky and Annie, you are all more precious than gold.

T he iconic cover photo of Time Between captures, with the snap of a cameras shutter, everything about the moment in American musical history when a quintessentially seminal California band forever changed pop culture throughout the world. That band, The Byrds, which would come to be known as Americas Beatles, not only reintroduced Bob Dylan as a rock-and-roll songwriting giant with the release of their indelibly cinematic recording of Mr. Tambourine Man, but planted a sonic victory flag foretelling the Golden States imminent conquests, reshaping, and shared dominance of modern popular music.

With everything that photo of The Byrds founding member Chris Hillman says about the cultural moment in which it was taken, its only upon reading here Chriss telling of his lifes journey and musical evolution that the image fully conveys everything else about the times between that moment and the collective moments that led up to it and beyond. In reading his book, I have come to conclude that a very strong argument can be made that Chris Hillman was, in fact, the very soul of The Byrds, always pushing himself and those around him in the band to see the possibilities of, not just what their music was, but what their music could become.

In the spectrum of California cultural expressions, if James Ellroys viscerally tragic scat-jazz autobiographic history, My Dark Places, embodies the antithesis of the worlds Ozzie and Harriet vision of post-war 1940s, 50s, and early 60s Southern California, then Chris Hillmans self-penned story unfolds as a parallel universe version of the same time and place that is disarmingly compelling in its succinct directness and profoundly innocent emotional candor. The window he opens onto his and his family members lives reveals the California that existed beneath the hazy shimmering mirage that was often viewed from the distance by those of us in the rest of America as an idealized sunlit Hockney-like daydream illusion that we believed existed. Unlike Ellroys seductively glamorous seedy tomes that often strut around in gilded counterpoint to the citrus crate bucolic perfection of the Nelsons TV world, Hillmans book resonates in a realm of unaffected honesty, never attempting verbose grandeur, but with every page, paragraph, sentence, and word disclosing a sublime reality.

That cover photo moment of Chris embodies, simultaneously, the worldly awareness, cultural coolness, and ricocheting angst-riddled earnestness that is uniquely and specifically embedded in the Tom Joad-cum-James Dean/Steve McQueen DNA of Californias versions of rock, pop, country, and, ultimately, the LA-born genre of country-rock music. As I remarked in a previous foreword for the book